Facebook Stops Penalizing Third-Party Apps, Focuses On Posting Quality

Nov 9, 2011 1 min readNews and Trends

Wow, this is one of the most exciting updates coming from Facebook in a long time. When it became clear after a recent study that Facebook penalizes 3rd party Apps significantly, there was a lot of uproar.

A large number of publishers were facing a strong disadvantage when it came to posting updates. In a recent study it was revealed that engagement with posts from these 3rd party Apps can drop up to 80%.

However, this is about to change, mentions Facebook’s developer consultant Matt Trainer in a recent statement:

“We will continue to add in more Page post quality signals over time to ensure that people are always receiving engaging and relevant content in their News Feed.”

Does this change stop penalization of 3rd party Apps?

The obvious question that comes from this is whether 3rd party Apps will now no longer be penalized as it is solely post quality that counts according to Facebook’s edgerank algorithm.

Trainer confirms exactly that and goes on to explain:

“…we recently made a fix that added more signals to detect good quality posting behavior. This should improve the situation with the distribution of posts coming from third-party apps in the News Feed.”

If you ask me, this is one of the best decisions Facebook could make. Particularly as Zuckerberg revealed it is now about building Facebook out as a platform with a strong 3rd party App eco-system.

With Buffer’s launch for Facebook today, this timing couldn’t be timed any better.  Personally I have started to see 3rd party Apps showing up more consistently again in my newsstream.

Do you see this happening too? Have you seen any changes in the types of posts that show up in your news stream recently?

Thanks for the heads up from Guenter Exel (@guenterexel) and ReadWriteWeb on this story.

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